


Put Your Lips Close to Mine

by ellacj



Series: 52 Weeks of Swan Queen [13]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, it's swan queen at the end promise, trying a more poetic style with this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 07:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3684387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellacj/pseuds/ellacj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kiss me and you will see how important I am."</p><p>-Sylvia Plath</p>
            </blockquote>





	Put Your Lips Close to Mine

**Author's Note:**

> A few days late, but here's Week 13, kids!
> 
> Title taken from "Treacherous" by Taylor Swift.

Regina’s first kiss was with her mother.

Wrong, maybe, but Cora didn’t care. Regina had just turned fourteen and Cora decided that to become a woman, she had to be able to please. Cora’s kisses don’t excite her in the way kisses should, but they’re better than the other kind of attention her mother gives her. Regina much prefers kiss-swollen lips to tender red welts in strategic spots always hidden by her dress.

For four years, kissing Cora doesn’t count. It’s just practice. It’s just survival.

Kissing Daniel is like floating on clouds, even if he doesn’t quite know how to do it properly and his tongue is a clumsy presence in her mouth. She loves the bumbling enthusiasm he offers, his hands clutching at her waist and both of them smiling so much they can barely kiss at all. It’s a welcome break from the indifferent expertise Cora brings her, and his inexperienced tongue paints pictures of a future she can almost touch, almost feel on her face as he smiles with eyes like two tiny oceans.

Regina, too, has eyes resembling oceans on the day he dies, overflowing their banks and creating rivers down a face whose innocence has been torn from her by a mother who swears she cares.

And then there’s the king.

They call him Good King Leopold, but Regina calls him her monster. Kissing Leopold is like fighting a war she doesn’t want to win. She always struggles, always resists, but she soon learns that it's better to simply let him win. If he thought he owned her it was over faster. She used to cry at night after he left her chambers, left her ravaged and broken on her bed. It took two months before she learned to endure it with silent dignity.

It took Tinker Bell. Regina’s still not quite sure if she jumped or fell off that balcony when Tink saved her life, but whatever happened was worth it to land in the arms of the sweetest woman around. Regina and Tink bump noses when they kiss, and they never did really figure out what to do with their hands.

Most of the time they end up just clasping them together. The one time Regina tried to run her hand through Tink’s hair her fingers got stuck in blonde curls, and it took ten minutes of hushed giggles before they got it out.

Being with Tink is all innocence; pure, naïve exploration, and it makes Regina’s heart beat faster than she’s ever known. Except for one day, Tink decides to prove their love, show Regina that Tinker Bell herself is Regina’s soulmate.

She isn’t.

It’s a man sitting in a tavern with a tattoo on his arm and no blonde curls to speak of. Regina runs away and so does Tink and they don’t speak again for a while. Regina spends her nights alone from then, until Rumplestiltskin sends her to see Maleficent and it all starts anew.

Maleficent’s kisses are all about passion. She’s powerful yet gentle, and she cradles the back of Regina’s head in her hands with all the strength and tenderness of an animal with its meal. Their days are explosive and their nights are more so, throwing spells at trees until the sun goes down and Regina can show off her true talents.

Of course she falls in love.

Because despite everything, she’s still a child; only nineteen. When she kisses Maleficent she feels the same stirring inside her she felt when she kissed Tinker Bell and Daniel, and she knows she wants more of it. The feeling ends when Maleficent laughs Regina out of her palace at the mere suggestion of anything more than a physical relationship.

Regina spends the next few decades not kissing, but planning. How to get rid of her husband, how to get revenge on Snow White, how to find a happy ending in a world where hers has been ripped away time after time after wretched time and all she wants is to kiss someone and know they’ll still be there to kiss again tomorrow.

She doesn’t kiss anyone again until Graham.

Kissing Graham is like kissing a brick wall. It’s boring. Twenty-eight years of the same hookup every night can do that. She used to love the power she had over him, the control she exerted to make him kiss her when she knew he didn’t want to, but even that grew tiresome.

Even still, she keeps him around. It’s nice to pretend that he actually wants to be there with her, if even for a split second. She truly is devastated when she kills him. And it’s at the funeral of Sheriff Graham Humbert that she sees Emma Swan for the first time as something more than Henry’s highly inconvenient birthmother.

It’s another year or so before Regina’s kissed again, this time by the man attached to the lion tattoo, Robin Hood himself. Unfortunately, Robin is even more boring than Graham. His kisses are lacking; not in love, but in excitement. Robin is _easy_. She doesn’t have to work to make him love her, because he already does. While she might have loved his ultimate worship back in her days as queen, now it only serves to make her wish for more.

That doesn’t make her any less upset when Marian returns.

It’s Emma’s fault, she tells herself, and certainly not her own. She won’t blame herself for not being exciting enough to make up the deficit. She’s too upset to notice the hurt, the longing in sharp green eyes as she turns to go, ignoring echoes of her own name being called in voices she doesn’t need to hear.

She doesn’t need someone who worships her, she tells herself. She just needs someone who understands her. Coincidentally, Emma Swan says something eerily similar to that a few weeks after Marian and Robin reunite. _We understand each other, Regina_ , bounces around her mind until she hears her own voice calling Emma’s name and feels her legs bringing her to stand.

Kissing Emma is everything. It’s Tinker Bell’s innocence, it’s Maleficent’s passion, it’s Robin Hood’s love, it’s Daniel’s enthusiasm. It’s the tenderness Cora never had, it’s the care Leopold lacked, it makes her feel so much more alive than Graham ever did and she cups Emma’s face in her hands and presses her closer, brings her body closer, brings them closer closer _closer_ until Emma’s practically straddling her.

It’s like a supernova, erupting with a force to destroy a star, like an entire galaxy exploding within her in every direction and she’s not really sure but her entire body might be glowing right now. _I hope someday you find someone_ , Tinker Bell had said on the night she left, _that makes you feel like the sun was something they made for you in their workshop._

Regina really thinks she’s found it in Emma, in the Savior, in the baby born to her own stepdaughter meant to be her undoing. And yes, she can feel herself coming undone, but not in the way anyone expected, and her head is spinning when Emma finally pulls back and her eyes are greener than Zelena’s envy and her lips are swollen like Regina’s were when she was fifteen and begged her mother to stop.

But this, this is a good kind of swell, the kind that makes you smile and want to go again, when you know your lips fit perfectly with someone else’s and you never want to be apart from them. It’s this kiss that makes Regina decide. She decides right here, right now, that she never wants to kiss anyone else.

Ever.

Again.


End file.
